SOS for stressed out teens

By Kelly Wallace, CNN

Updated 1605 GMT (0005 HKT) October 7, 2014

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Want to lower your teen's stress? – When Traci Garcia's 19-year-old daughter feels super stressed out, Garcia (the co-owner of a spa) treats her to a facial. "It's a full hour of uninterrupted relaxation that she appreciates," said Garcia of Harwood Heights, Illinois.

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Want to lower your teen's stress? – Lori Lite, founder of Stress Free Kids, encourages her teens to use visualization techniques to relax. Here, her son is seen jumping off a cliff, the result, she says, of "visualizing and affirming that 'I can do it' and expecting and visualizing a positive outcome."

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Want to lower your teen's stress? – Ivan Baker of Brooklyn, New York, shared his answer to helping a stressful teen: "Hand them a 4-year-old sister. That works for us."

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Want to lower your teen's stress? – Author and fatherhood advocate Jim Higley, founder of the site Bobblehead Dad, says he gives his high schooler foot rubs several times a day. "I'm serious. It totally calms him down ... and if it works for him, it works for me," said Higley of Chicago.

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Want to lower your teen's stress? – When Lisa Katzman's 17-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter are feeling stressed, one of the things the Chantilly, Virginia, mom does is encourage them to hang out with Ted, their wheaten terrier, especially while doing homework.

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Want to lower your teen's stress? – Deborah Zupancic, founder of the site Parenting Renewed, shared a photo of her son, a high school junior, who fell asleep at the dining room table while doing his homework. She says: "Communication between parent and teen is crucial. These kids need to be taught how to navigate through stressful situations, so they bring these tools into adulthood."

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Want to lower your teen's stress? – Mona Steinberg said she helps her teenage daughters cope with stress by always being available to chat. "When they want to talk, drop everything you are doing and listen. As they get older, their desire to talk to their parents decreases, so treasure the moments when they do want to share and talk," she said.

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Want to lower your teen's stress? – Author Deborah Copaken Kogan came up with the idea of mom-daughter guitar lessons as a break from the hours of homework her daughter gets at her highly competitive high school. "We smile when we play. We beam, in fact. The oxytocin flows between us just like it did when I fed her as a baby. It's been a lifesaver and a gift. I wish I'd thought of it sooner," said the mom of three.

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Want to lower your teen's stress? – Jeanna Hale, mom of five including two teens and a 15-month-old, said teens today don't know how to unplug. "I insist on (a) technology-free family dinner. I also stick to a structure - teens need it. Chores, free time, clear expectations. And I talk to (my daughter) all the time - even when it drives her crazy."

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Want to lower your teen's stress? – Katie Danziger, founder of Nomie Baby, which offers unique car seat covers among other products, heads to the kitchen to lower stress for her daughters, age 18 and 7 (pictured here). "Baking is always a good one, and then the benefits of the great smells from the oven reinforce the ahhhh," the New York mom of three said.

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Want to lower your teen's stress? – Author and comedian Sarah Maizes, mom to three including an almost 14-year-old, also does plenty of baking to combat stress. "Nothing like making a batch of blondies from scratch - cracking, beating and bombarding the batter with M&M's and chocolate chunks - to let off some steam," she said.

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Want to lower your teen's stress? – Merin Dahlerbruch says whenever her 17-year-old son is angry, stressed or down, he picks up his trumpet. "It gives him something else to focus on and allows him a fresh start. We love that he is already learning how to handle stress on his own, which hopefully will set him out on a good path for his life," she added.

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Story highlights

Nearly 40% of parents say their kids are stressed from school, according to a new poll

Growing up with social media means today's teens have less time to truly unplug

Parents contribute to kids' stress by not knowing how to cope with their own, experts say

Mindfulness activities such as "quiet time" are helping students lower their stress at school

Ask parents of teens if their children are more stressed than they were at the same age, and they'll usually tell you, "Absolutely."

"I went to a high school that at the time was considered one of the 10 best high schools in the country, and I think in high school I had less advanced work than they have now," said Nancy Friedman of New York, referring to her 13-year-old twins,

"They are writing real research papers ... much more is expected of them," said Friedman, who is co-founder of a video sharing platform for tweens called KidzVuz.

Teens are feeling the pressure of more demanding curriculum, longer homework sessions, high-stakes testing and more competitive college admissions, according to a new poll.

The poll, conducted by NPR along with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Harvard School of Public Health, found that nearly 40% of parents said their high school kids are experiencing a lot of stress from school.

"They have to do their AP (advanced placement) work, they have to be in honors classes, and it's not just enough to be in them, but they have to excel," said Jaclyn Bealer, who spends her summers training teens to be counselors at a camp in Branchville, New Jersey.

"They're just putting so much pressure on themselves to get the absolute best grade possible, and anything under a 90% is failure," said Bealer.

Friedman, the mom of twins, knows that firsthand. Her daughter Rachel "literally will be upset if she gets a 98 instead of 100 on something," she said during a family interview at her home.

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"I do not like getting below a 100," Rachel admitted with a laugh.

Social media adds to the stress

Today's teens, unlike when I was growing up, can now compare their academic performance and everything else about their existence to other teens 24 hours a day through updates on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, you name the social network, and that only increases the stress.

"Back in the day, we got a break from our peers after school and on the weekends, but now kids are on social media all day long," said Linda Esposito, a licensed clinical social worker and psychotherapist in Los Angeles and host of a blog on psychotherapy called Talk Therapy Biz.

Daniel Goleman, a psychologist and author of the New York Times best-seller "Emotional Intelligence," says all the social media and advanced technology mean more distractions for kids and less time to truly unplug.

"It used to be that children had time to look at clouds and imagine," said Goleman, whose latest book is "Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence." "Now they're looking at video games and are competing with some kid in Hong Kong."

Pressure from parents

Teens aren't just feeling stress from academic pressures. Their schedules are also filled with activities and sports after school and on weekends, raising questions for us parents about whether our children are overscheduled and whether we, as parents, are pushing them to do too much.

"There's a little fallacy that we have to enrich our children's experience with every kind of lesson and every kind of sport and every kind of club, and that backfires at a certain point," said Goleman.

"It could be their own self-esteem is tied into that. It could be that they didn't have the kind of chances that their child had," said Bernstein, who says parents sometimes also have their own hopes and goals for their child that might not mesh with what the child wants to do.

"In that sense, they lose touch with what is happening with their kid," he said.

Bealer, the camp supervisor, says plenty of teens feel like their parents don't give them space to be themselves.

"One of the biggest things that I hear is kids don't necessarily feel that they're being listened to, and that they're being told a lot of what to do," she said.

What they get at camp, she says, is "just having someone to listen to them and not judge them for maybe what their dreams may be or what they're worried about, not minimalizing their worries."

Parents also contribute to their teens' stress by not figuring out how to cope with their own stress, said Lori Lite, who created the parenting site Stress Free Kids after the stresses of parenting were starting to make her sick.

"Many parents demonstrate unhealthy coping mechanisms and live a full-blown stressed out lifestyle," said Lite. "Teens learn and internalize these messages."

Now that we know some of the reasons why our teens may be feeling more stressed out than we did as kids, what can we do about it?

CNN's Kelly Wallace talked to parents, teens, psychologists and other experts about why our teens are feeling so stressed.

We asked CNN's Facebook community and received a ton of great tips included in the gallery above, everything from Merin Dahlerbruch of Rancho Palos Verdes, California encouraging her 17-year-old to pick up a trumpet to Traci Garcia of Harwood Heights, Illinois, giving her daughter a facial.

We also heard a lot about teaching our children how to relax, through breathing exercises and meditation.

In fact, several schools, including one in San Francisco, have adopted what's called "quiet time," during which students meditate for 10 to 15 minutes in the morning and again in the afternoon. Some schools that have implemented the new approach report a decline in absences and suspensions, and an increase in test scores.

"Regardless of socioeconomic status or race or the type of school, public or private, I think that kids in general need to be taught how to relax, how to breathe appropriately to calm themselves, how to recognize the signs of stress," said Esposito, who uses mindfulness exercises with many of her patients.

Lite, the founder of Stress Free Kids, is a big proponent of breathing, relaxation and visualization exercises for parents and children.

When her daughter went to high school, she said, the principal "began to brag" about the amount of stress teens would experience as freshmen. Her husband wrote her a note asking, "Are they going to teach them how to manage the stress?" she told me.

That's when Lite decided to create a CD for teens to help them manage anxiety and stress.

"If you watch teens take tests or you watch them play video games, if you watch carefully, you will also see them stop breathing," said Bernstein, the stress expert.

"Teaching kids to be calmer in their body by breathing, by learning how to keep themselves grounded, simple techniques of meditation ... things that we know work in terms of stress reduction, we should be teaching that stuff in school and parents should be doing it."